Saturday, November 10, 2007
Pork soup
Pork soup had another outing a couple of days ago. Cooked the pearl barley for rather longer than usual which turned the cooking water into a thin, porriagey tasting gruel. A bit like something one might get in one of the more Chinese Chinese restaurants in Soho. Not sure that I like it as well as the less cooked version but still went down OK. The two of us did maybe three pints of the stuff in a sitting.
That apart, been a fishy week. Smoked haddock (no doubt about to be banned by the health people because of all the organic smoke that it contains). Baked cod from the man from Hastings. Not mushy - mushiness being associated with the cod from the man from Grimsby - which had rather put me off buying cod altogether. The man from Hastings claims to sell same day stuff which might be the differance. Then two kedgerees - one at home and one at the Estrella. The latter was a Portuguese version involving sun dried cod, sliced hard boiled eggs, potatoes and some other things which I forget. Eaten with olive oil. So not a proper kedgeree but tasted very like one - and very good it was too.
Some factoids from the TLS. First, some furtive branch of the US government wrote a 100 page classified report on Iraq and lodged it with the Senate for their education prior to their voting on whether to allow the president to go to war. The public part of the reading room record says that 6 of them - out of 100 - bothered, one of whom claimed that it changed his vote from yes to no war. One suspects that Hilary C was one of the couldn't be bothereds as she voted yes. Second, one can amuse oneself by drawing the routes around Dublin taken by the charectars in books by James Joyce. It seems that some of them make shapes, for example a cross in one and a question mark in another. Perhaps he went in for animals as well. I suspect a leg pull on the part of Mr Joyce. A forerunner of conceptual (or perhaps performance) art. How challenging would Sir Dame Emin find it to write a story about her pub crawl around Leicester which traced out the shape of an unmade bed? She might not manage the vocabulary for a crawl around the bed in question. Third, there was a reproduction of a page from a book of hours or something, a propos of a collector who committed the frightful crime of breaking ancient books down into their constituent pages and then sticking a page or two into each copy of expensive limited edition coffee table books - out of which he made a lot of money. That being as it may, and leaving the fact that it appeared to be in Latin aside, it would take a lot of practise the read the stuff. A large proportion of the text appeared to be identical vertical strokes (presumably a relatively easy mark to make with a quill pen) and presumably making up i's, n's, m's and u's. I couldn't make head nor tail of them.
Coninue to peg on with the strange prose of Carlyle on the French Revolution. A very florid style but one does get used to it and he does have an interesting story to tell. Rather to my surprise, he also knew about super cooled liquids, the slightest perturbation of which causes them to solidify, shattering into hundreds of small peices on the way. This by way of comparison with the state of France immediately prior to said Revolution.
That apart, been a fishy week. Smoked haddock (no doubt about to be banned by the health people because of all the organic smoke that it contains). Baked cod from the man from Hastings. Not mushy - mushiness being associated with the cod from the man from Grimsby - which had rather put me off buying cod altogether. The man from Hastings claims to sell same day stuff which might be the differance. Then two kedgerees - one at home and one at the Estrella. The latter was a Portuguese version involving sun dried cod, sliced hard boiled eggs, potatoes and some other things which I forget. Eaten with olive oil. So not a proper kedgeree but tasted very like one - and very good it was too.
Some factoids from the TLS. First, some furtive branch of the US government wrote a 100 page classified report on Iraq and lodged it with the Senate for their education prior to their voting on whether to allow the president to go to war. The public part of the reading room record says that 6 of them - out of 100 - bothered, one of whom claimed that it changed his vote from yes to no war. One suspects that Hilary C was one of the couldn't be bothereds as she voted yes. Second, one can amuse oneself by drawing the routes around Dublin taken by the charectars in books by James Joyce. It seems that some of them make shapes, for example a cross in one and a question mark in another. Perhaps he went in for animals as well. I suspect a leg pull on the part of Mr Joyce. A forerunner of conceptual (or perhaps performance) art. How challenging would Sir Dame Emin find it to write a story about her pub crawl around Leicester which traced out the shape of an unmade bed? She might not manage the vocabulary for a crawl around the bed in question. Third, there was a reproduction of a page from a book of hours or something, a propos of a collector who committed the frightful crime of breaking ancient books down into their constituent pages and then sticking a page or two into each copy of expensive limited edition coffee table books - out of which he made a lot of money. That being as it may, and leaving the fact that it appeared to be in Latin aside, it would take a lot of practise the read the stuff. A large proportion of the text appeared to be identical vertical strokes (presumably a relatively easy mark to make with a quill pen) and presumably making up i's, n's, m's and u's. I couldn't make head nor tail of them.
Coninue to peg on with the strange prose of Carlyle on the French Revolution. A very florid style but one does get used to it and he does have an interesting story to tell. Rather to my surprise, he also knew about super cooled liquids, the slightest perturbation of which causes them to solidify, shattering into hundreds of small peices on the way. This by way of comparison with the state of France immediately prior to said Revolution.
# posted by Jim @ 10:25 AM 
